Comedian Joanne McNally looks back: ‘In my 20s, my bulimia was spiralling out of control. My breakdown was the making of me’ | Family

Born in County Roscommon in 1983 and raised in Dublin, Joanne McNally is a standup comedian and writer. Her breakthrough came with the one-woman show Bite Me, and her subsequent tour, Prosecco Express, included a 78-night run at Dublin’s Vicar Street. She co-hosts the hit podcast My Therapist Ghosted Me with Vogue Williams. Her standup show Pinotphile is touring Ireland and the UK until December. She hosts Unacceptable with Ed Gamble and Richard Ayoade on TLC.

I’m three and in the garden of my Aunty Joan’s house in Dublin, in knee-high socks with those little black crossbar brogues everyone had, a white polo neck and little bows in my hair.

I was always very well turned out. Much like Joan. Joan is dead now, but she was ahead of her time – a single, child-free woman who wore fur coats and pearl earrings. No one really knew what her job was. She just flew a lot. I used to feel sorry for her because she had no children. Little did I know she was leading an incredibly glamorous, aspirational life.

My mother says that I was very flirtatious as a child – giggling at strangers, a little bit charming. I was loud and loved to tell stories – I remember standing on the rockery in the yard in school, as if risen, with a horseshoe of little girls round me, telling everyone my origin story. That my birth parents had been killed in an airplane crash, and that I was the sole survivor, which is why I was adopted. All of which was untrue. But it was my first little one-woman show and I liked the feeling of having an audience.

As far back as I can remember, I always thought I was fat. Some kids grow up and turn into little beanpoles, but I was a bit bigger. When we played mummies and daddies, I was always the daddy. When we had the school musical, I played the boys’ roles. It didn’t help that I had a fringe that looked like it had been sewn on from a horse’s arse.

I wasn’t an attractive teenager, either. I didn’t look like the back of a bus, and I did some good numbers when it came to lads, but they were not exactly chasing after me. I felt like more of a personality hire and, because of that, I wanted to be more desirable. For a young girl, there’s a quickfire way you can do that, and that’s to shed weight.

Once I hit my 20s, I went foot to the gas. Me and my friends were big drinkers and loved going clubbing and doing three-day benders. I don’t regret a minute of it as I made some of my best friends in Dublin. I was working as a PR for a youth agency and we were living the brand – partying all the time, wearing bicycle locks as necklaces, backward baseball caps and huge tortoiseshell glasses. But in the background to all the fun, my bulimia was spiralling out of control.

In my late 20s, I went to work for a mental health charity. I thought it would help. There is often denial involved in mental illnesses, and I thought if I could just get out of the PR job, my headspace might change. I went from super-busy and sociable to one email a day, and it sent me absolutely nuts. In that solitude, I let the eating disorder take over.

In my early 30s, I decided I would totally succumb to the mental breakdown so that no one would expect anything from me. I quit my job and moved into my mum’s attic, cocooned at the top of the house and living like a mental patient. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone – bulimia is really bad for you, and I still get teeth pulled out and filled in because being sick messes you up – but it was the making of me. In my breakdown I was presented with a big fork in the road. I had no mortgage, no kids. While I wasn’t in a position to be earning, I had the financial freedom to explore what I should be doing with my life.

Aside from wanting to be desired, the other reason I became bulimic was that I was deeply unsatisfied. I tried to get a sense of validation or achievement from being thin, as there was this other part of me I wasn’t expressing. That changed when my friend Una wrote a play called Singlehood. She asked if I would be in it. This sounds wanky, but once I stood on stage, it felt as if I was home. The play was going well, then I got a column in a newspaper, based on an anonymous blog I was writing at the time called Eat the Pastry, about bulimia. Suddenly I was in a play and making a teeny bit of money writing. I had a real reason to get better.

Initially I thought I’d go into theatre but then I crossed paths with a comedian called PJ Gallagher who was very sure that I should try standup. I was ambitious and driven but I lacked confidence – and still do. Had he not been so encouraging, there’s no way I would have stepped on stage at a comedy club.

I started my podcast with Vogue during lockdown. We had this trapped audience, everyone was inside and on their phones and needed company. It wasn’t until the restrictions had lifted and I was doing a gig in a club in Greenwich, south London, that I realised that it wasn’t just my bubble listening to it. Four girls had come down to see me and asked for a photo afterwards. It wasn’t like I was Paul McCartney at the height of the Beatles, but it was the first sign that something was happening.

The version of me on stage with a mic is feral – and so are the audience. The crowds at my gigs are boozy, because I am a boozer, but in spite of how mad the energy is, everyone is respectful. I have had a couple of stage-stormers, however, and there have been kerfuffles – mainly handbags falling off balconies by accident, and the crowd telling whoever dropped it to shut up while they’re trying to retrieve it. In general, they are funny and sweet. I get a lot of single people, which I love, and there’s a woman in Kilkenny who comes to my Christmas show every year, takes a photo of us together, and the following year presents me with a snowglobe containing the picture.

Comedy does attract a certain type of character, and I’ve met a lot of adopted comics over the years. I always thought there was no connection between the two things, but there is probably something in the huge effort to prove yourself and your worth, and being put up for adoption. Really, though, doesn’t everyone want to be accepted by the tribe? I had always wondered if my birth parents were the reason why I wanted to be an entertainer. When I met them in my late 20s, I was preparing to discover I was part of some massive showbiz dynasty, a long line of pantomime performers. Of course, I’m not. My birth father was, like, “I think you’re just your own thing.”

If you told the insecure 18-year-old me I’d be doing comedy for a living, her jaw would be on the floor. But the little girl version of me in the photo would not be surprised. She was obsessed with Annie the orphan and knew her destiny was treading the boards – being loud, telling stories on stage, where I belong.